Enrolled in a scuba class at a local dive shop walking
distance from the hotel. Owner Steven (who looks just like Tom Kopp) asked me
to read two chapters before the first class. Told him I was Herminone and would
have the whole book done by then. He knew what I meant.

Passed the physical and the water fitness test, though
by the end of the 200-meter swim I was in marginal shape. But I did fine with
the equipment and the pool exercises--mask clearing, reg recovery, weight belt
removal and reattachment, etc. So last weekend we met our instructor Brucie
at what I called scuba chalet--a beach house Steven has in a small town (the
only business is a gas station that also sells meat pies) on the southern NSW
coast.

There's no OCS (only child syndrom) at scuba chalet.
It astonished me that NSW has miles of pristine coves with just a few locals
hanging out--anything like that would be swamped in the US. But in NSW, more
than 2-3 people per cove is a crowd. Random neighbors kept drifting through
the house to say hi, borrow stuff, whatever.

The first day I did great with the buddy rescue, emergency
recovery and other exercises.

On the second day after the 4th training drive of doing
the march of the penguins down a long steep path with 27lb of weights, full
tank and BC and snorkeling out to a dive site, it was clear to me that I didn't
have the endurance to be a safe diver. After reaching the dive spot on that
dive (middle of the cove), I was no good for anything else (does Cantinflas
bring any pictures to mind?). So I because a scuba school dropout. (Paul Anka
didn't descend from the clouds singing. But the instructor noted I was uncomfortable
in the water and didn't have enough confidence. Water has never been my friend.)

Crappy swimming skills are part of the problem. I wouldn't
wear myself out so soon if my form was half-decent. Fortunately Peter came to
the US from Ireland on a swimming scholarship and made the Olympic trials. Will
take lessons on alternate days from kickboxing. When I can swim 500m without
exhausting myself, I'll complete the course. Aiming for March. (Sports every
day is very Aussie. Somehow they have the time for it. They're just so much
more relaxed about everything.)

Turns out I can still scuba the reef if I want--they
have hand-held dives for non-certified divers. Got a flight to Cairns weekend
after next.

From left to right:

Johnathan is a project manager for an Xbox games company.
He has 30 people in Canberra and 30 in Boston. He graduated with a degree in
experimental psych, and was snapped up. He couldn't tell me about his current
project, should be on the market in a year. He says a main issue facing Xbox
developers is parallel processing. When there were just 3 CPUs, one was for
physics, one for graphics, and one for game play. Now that there are 9, it's
hard to figure out how to use them effectively. (I suggested a grid computing
approach, he didn't pick up on it.)

Brucie the instructor was a Navy man ("smartly now!").
His first wife decided to be a lesbian feminist and walked out (he things the
real issue is that she was bored being a housewife.) He remarried and has a
second family, while his first wife became a train wreck. His current wife is
researching for a science fiction novel. He's anti-immigrant.

Kurt went to a boarding school because his Mum didn't
like the Canberra school system--well, actually, it was because he never showed
up at school, always finding something more interesting to do on the way. He's
now an airplane mechanic. He took the course because Mum paid for it, then chickened
out at the last minute.

Elaine (facing away) is an accountant. She has more than
a bit of Hermione in her..the arrogance and the flounce, and she's always right,
even when she led us to the wrong Thai restaraunt in Ulladulla, which is a little
backwater costal town which thanks to immigration policy, has two Thai restaraunts.
Dinner was an opportunity for her to see her parents for the first time in four
months.

Rob worked for Elaine for 4 months now. She thought a
teambuilding activity would be a good idea. Told him I felt for him doing all
this struggle-type stuff in front of his boss. He changed the subject.

Not shown:

Darryl the co-instructor works for the state fisheries
management agency.

Bob is an ex-cop who now is an application service provider
in Canberra. He does web forms and workflow and hosting for companies in the
200-2000 people range. He'd traveled through the US and loved to discourse on
cultural differences (more on this later). I mentioned tools he could be using
and wasn't. He got my phone number and we'll do dinner sometime.

Pretty good for 36 hours together, eh? Some bonding definitely
went down.